JESUS OTJR MASTER, AND LOED.-A TRACT FOR THE TIMES. 



A SERMON 



PREACHED AT THE 



ORDINATION OF ME. HENRY P. JENKS, 



At Fitchburg, Mass., April 10, 1867. 



BY ANDREW P. PEABODY. 



PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 



BOSTON: 
PRESS OF GEORGE C. RAND & AVERY, NO. 3 CORNHILL. 
1867. 



E 

o 



SERMON. 



John xiii. 13. — " Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say well; 
for so I am." 

Did the apostles say well ? And is it well for us to 
say so ? It is the most important question that we can 
ask and answer in connection with the services of 
this hour ; for on our answer to it depends our entire 
theory of the Christian ministry; nay more, on the 
answer which the Church shall give to it, depends the 
permanence of the Church, and of the institutions now 
called Christian. 

Have we,' then, a Master and a Lord ? or is it with 
us as with the Hebrews when there was no king in 
Israel, and every man did what seemed right in his own 
eyes? 

In answering this question, I would first say, we 
need a Master and a Lord. It is admitted that Chris- 
tendom has not hitherto fared the worse for its alleged 
bondage ; but our age, we are told, has outgrown it, 
and is wise enough to solve for itself all problems ap- 
pertaining to God, duty, the soul, eternity. In what,, 
then, consist the boasted achievements of our age? 
They are almost all material, and cannot help us in the 
investigation of moral and spiritual truth, The rail- 
way and the steamship may make our antipodes our 
neighbors ; but they bring us no nearer to the stars, or 
to Him whose palace-floor they pave. The telegraph 
borrows the lightning's wings to carry messages be- 



4 A TRACT FOR THE TIMES. 

tween living men ; but the speaking wires have not 
yet been stretched to the dwelling-place of departed 
spirits. ' The sun paints for us the images of things 
that we have seen ; but it gives us no pictures from the 
realm of the unseen. These triumphs of art are sim- 
ply Titanic, — the development of earth - forces, and 
they make no approach toward the solution of spiritual 
problems. 

Pass we to the science of organized and of inorganic 
nature' : here there has been a vast progress in analy- 
sis, classification, and nomenclature ; but those who, in 
these departments, have most enlarged the area of pos- 
itive knowledge and fructifying thought, do not even 
profess to have opened new sources of spiritual truth. 
Bold attempts have, indeed, been made to cast discredit 
on the primeval record of man's divine sonship, and to 
prove him a not very far-off cousin of the ape and the 
gorilla ; and this is confessedly among the secrets of 
nature hidden from the mind of Jesus Christ : but the 
most that can be claimed is, that the so-much coveted 
relationship is barely possible ; those who crave it sup- 
plying in that very craving a stronger evidence than 
any facts that can be adduced. Not a single plank on 
which one can tread with a firm foothold has been laid 
over the chasm which separates the human body, mind, 
and soul from the most advanced species of the brute 
creation. 

Then, too, in the field of intellectual philosophy, 
there has been no progress. There is as little com- 
mon and admitted ground between concurrent schools 
as when Plato and Aristotle held divided sway and 
rival sceptres. 

What is man? Whence? Whither? What is 
death ? What lies beyond death ? What is our rela- 
tion to the Supreme Being? What would He have us 
be and do ? These are questions on which the science 
« of the nineteenth century has no new deliverances. 
The most that it has done is to clear away the earth- 
mists that hung over this lower creation, and to shed 



JESUS OUR MASTER A^D LORD. 



5 



light where there was dense darkness, within the cir- 
cumference of that sensible horizon which bounds our 
view on every side. To the borders of the vast hori- 
zon which embraces the universe of living souls no 
mortal eye has yet penetrated ; and here we are no less 
dependent on revelation than were those to whom the 
nearest objects were unclassed, unanalyzed, unknown. 
All our science abuts upon invincible ignorance. In 
every branch of inquiry, the words that carry the most 
of the prestige of learning — such as gravitation, ca- 
loric, magnetism, electricity, force (of which, perhaps, 
all the rest are forms) — are but names for our utter 
ignorance, not for our knowledge. True science recog- 
nizes its own narrow confines, and treads them with 
veiled face and unshoclden feet, before Him whom man, 
by his searching, cannot find out, and whom we know 
only as Jesus has revealed Him. 

But you may ask, Are there not peculiarly porten- 
tous signs in our heavens ? Is there not an impatience 
of authority, a spurning of the idea of Christ's lord- 
ship and mastership, a craving for a new evangel, for 
something higher and better than Christianity, which 
distinguishes our age from all that have preceded it ? 
I answer, unhesitatingly, No. Among the greatest and 
wisest men, there was never a larger proportion of 
humbly and confidingly Christian men than now. Nor 
do I find that the pre-eminently good men and women 
of our time have one whit less reverence for Christ, 
and faith in him, than those of earlier generations. 
Those who have had the largest growth in Christ have 
not outgrown him. When you meet a person of a 
thoroughly saintly spirit, one from whose every word 
and look virtue goes forth, and in whose presence it is 
a blessing to linger, you never think of inquiring 
whether that person has got beyond Christianity, and 
refuses to call Jesus Master and Lord. You would be 
as much surprised to hear such a confession from him 
as you would to hear him pour out a torrent of coarse 
ribaldry and blasphemy. You know perfectly well 



6 



A TRACT FOE THE TIMES. 



that the higher planes of devotion, and of spiritual ex- 
cellence, are still occupied, as they have been for eigh- 
teen centuries, by disciples of Jesus the Master, by 
subjects of Jesus the Lord. 

But the cry, "We will not have this man to reign 
over us," has been heard from the very first ; and those 
who have raised it have always claimed to be the pro- 
gressive men of their times, in advance of Christian 
believers, — have always assumed a supercilious atti- 
tude toward those who maintained allegiance to Jesus 
of Nazareth. Nor is it a new thing for men of this 
class to exercise priestly functions in the Christian 
Church. Hume had, among those who shared his 
scepticism, a few, at least, of the Scotch clergy, who, 
in their formal adherence to the rigidly Calvinistic 
creed of their church, certainly evinced as large an ad- 
vance beyond Christian morality, as they professed to 
have made beyond Christian faith. In Germany, it is 
well known that unbelievers, pantheists, and atheists 
have, in large numbers and for a long time, borne office 
in the Lutheran church, — men whose honesty and piety 
equally challenge our admiration, when we consider 
that without professed assent to the Lutheran confes- 
sion of faith they could not have been inducted into 
office. 

Nor is the disavowal of the mastership and lordship 
of Christ a new or an increasing phenomenon in our 
own country. It was probably much more common 
among men of position and character sixty or seventy 
ago than it is now. We used to have infidel assem- 
blies, newspapers, bookstores, which have ceased to be, 
or to attract attention, simply because the so-called 
Christian pulpit and press now give free currency to 
sentiments which, in earlier times, were compelled to 
seek utterance outside of the nominal Church. For- 
merly, the man who believed that the whole o£ our 
Saviour's public ministry was a mistake, a failure, and a 
sin ; that he yielded to an ambition unworthy of him, 
when he talked of his kingdom, and used terms that 



JESUS OUR MASTEE AXD LORD. 



7 



implied a claim to leadership and authority ; that he 
expiated his presumption by his death, and bitterly re- 
pented of it too late in Gethseinane, — it should be 
added, to recant that repentance the very next morn- 
ing, when he said, "Hereafter shall ye see the Son of 
man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming 
in the clouds of heaven," — formerly, I say, one who 
thus believed would have honestly taken his position 
as an avowed enemy of Christianity, instead of arro- 
gating for this tissue of absurdity and blasphemy the 
pre-eminent title of Christianity, and stigmatizing the 
belief of the whole Christian world as pseudo-Chris- 
tianity. What is peculiar to our time and community 
is, first, that infidelity has become so illogical as to call 
itself by the very name it blasphemes ; and, secondly, 
that a liberality more weak than tolerant, more foolish 
than kind, insists on giving so broad a sense to Chris- 
tianity as to leave to it no distinctive meaning what- 
ever. If Thomas Paine were now alive and among us, 
he would style himself a Christian teacher, would have 
his name inserted — I trust without a parochial charge 
— in our " Year Book," would take his seat in our Con- 
vention as a delegate from Florence, or some other 
mythical church, and would complain of your bigotry 
if you would not let him preach in your pulpit, and 
welcome him as a contributor to your religious journals. 

Xow, I maintain that our age feels the need of a 
Master and Lord as intensely as it was ever felt ; the 
only difference being that the few who repudiate this 
need refuse to assume an antagonistic name, corre- 
sponding to their antagonistic attitude. 

I have spoken of the intellectual need of a Master 
and Lord. Our emotional nature feels the same need. 
Our hearts yearn for one whose voice they may hear 
with reverence and obey with confidence. " This need 
is supplied for us in infancy and childhood by the 
parents who are, to our inexperience, light and strength. 
But we may exhaust and transcend their wisdom ; in 
our adult years, we may, without vanity, feel that they 
are no longer our infallible guides. Yet the child-heart 



8 



A TRACT E0R THE TIMES. 



dies not, and ought not to die, within us; for, when 
father and mother forsake us, the Lord takes us up. 
Jesus, if we believe in him, comes into their place, 
stands as they stood between God and us, sustains in 
us the sweet and genial emotions of reverence and trust, 
preserves within us all that is most lovely in childhood, 
and keeps the heart still young when the head grows 
hoary. 

In our frail and feeble being, imbosomed in the infi- 
nite and the eternal, walking among the graves of our 
kindred and coevals, and perhaps on the brink of our 
own, can any thing be more unfitting than the arrogance 
and presumption that scout the very possibility of a 
keener insight than ours in the realm of the unseen, of 
a surer guidance in the realm of the unknown ? Can 
aught be more becoming than the humility and modesty 
which are at once the root, the blossom, and the fruit- 
age of faith ? And, let me ask, is there any so elevated 
type of human character, any which so much com- 
mands our admiration, and which we would so rejoice 
to have our own, as that profound faith, which having, 
in a pure, dutiful, and useful life, obeyed and followed 
a Lord and Master it has deemed divine, hears his 
voice amidst the thunder-tones of dissolving nature, 
sees his footprints in living light through the valley of 
the death-shadow, and can say, without doubt or mis- 
giving, " I know that my Redeemer liveth; and, because 
he lives, I shall live also ? " 

But it is said, by those who deny the authority and 
lordship of Jesus, The fundamental truths of Christi- 
anity are self-evident. They reveal themselves to con- 
sciousness ; they are verified by experience ; they are 
written on the heart of man. We believe them, not 
because they were uttered eighteen hundred years ago, 
but because they have the spontaneous and irrepres- 
sible testimony of our own souls. I reply, You are 
conscious of the circulation of the blood ; you feel it 
as you lay your fingers on your wrist, your hand on 
your heart ; but, before Harvey announced this circu- 
lation, it was no less real, yet it was not an object of 



JESUS OUR MASTER AXD LORD. 



9 



consciousness to the most acute physiologist. It is one 
thing to discover, quite another to recognize and verify, 
the facts of consciousness. If the truths of Christianity 
are intuitive and self-evident, how is it that they 
formed no part of any man's consciousness till the ad- 
vent of Christ? How is it that they are not springing 
up to-day in the consciousness of astute and specula- 
tive men in China and in India ? How is it that the 
only regions in which this consciousness is attained are 
those in which the words of Jesus are familiarly known, 
and that the very men who have this independent con- 
sciousness of their truth have, without an exception, 
been trained in conversance with the evangelic record ? 

But it is said, The human mind reaches not its full 
development in any one individual or age. Each gen- 
eration is heir of the attainments, the discovered truths, 
of all preceding generations. The discoveries of one 
age are the axioms of the next. The child begins 
where the father left off. Christianity marks the 
highest religious development of its own age, the 
ripened product of the religious wisdom of preceding 
ages. Jesus was the representative religious genius of 
his time, yet only its natural growth ; and, as he ex- 
ceeded all that went before him, so there will come 
after him those greater than he. I reply by asking, 
Where was the heritage to which he succeeded? Was 
it in his own nation? — in the pitiful drivellings of the 
rabbis, of which we have full record ? Or was it in the 
more cultivated nations of classic fame ? Many of you 
are familiar with the Greek and Latin authors before, 
at, and after the Christian era. Do you find in them 
the remotest approach to Christianity, — the faintest 
tokens of a religious development which culminated in 
the gospel? Virgil, Ovid, and Horace flourished in 
the generation immediately preceding the promulgation 
of Christianity. Do they indicate a high stage of re- 
ligious progress ? If Christ and those who wrote con- 
cerning him be left out of the question, is there so 
much as a fragment of the literature of his age that 
implies an advanced maturity of wisdom as to the 



10 



A TRACT FOE THE TIMES. 



truths appertaining to man's nature, duty, and destiny ? 
Are not the thoughtful writers of the age groping in 
darkness, though longing for light, while the greater 
part of those whose works have come down to us be- 
tray a moral culture beneath that of the lowest dregs 
of Christian society ? A little before the Christian era, 
thepontifex maximus proposed in the Roman senate 
that the traitors convicted of participation in Catiline's 
conspiracy should not be put to death, but should be 
subjected to imprisonment, chains, and privation as 
long as they lived ; because death, being the end of 
life, was, of course, the end of suffering. He accom- 
panied the proposal with a sneer at the old fables 
about Tartarus, and the sentiment was received with- 
out rebuke or dissent. Does this denial of immortality 
by the most august and enlightened assembly upon earth 
indicate a hopeful stage of human progress toward 
the clear and confident enunciation of that truth so 
shortly afterward from the lips of Jesus ? 

Moreover, if Christ's wisdom only marked a stage 
in the natural development of human thought, how is 
it that the greater than Christ is yet to come ? Why 
is it that hitherto the wisest and best have been his 
followers, and that those who have most outgrown 
their fellows have still ascribed to him all that they 
have and are ? Is there not a very strong prestige in 
behalf of one whose wisdom and purity thus set him 
apart from, and raised him above, the men of his own 
and succeeding ages ? Especially if he, the most 
lowly and modest of beings, yet asserts his own pre- 
eminent right to reverence and confidence; if, while 
performing the most menial of offices, as he moves 
from disciple to disciple with the basin and towel, he 
yet tells them that they say well when they call him 
Master and Lord, — is there not at least a probability 
that they said well ? 

But we want more than this. We want his creden- 
tials. We want positive proof of his specially divine 
commission, of his right to the eminence unrivalled 
and alone among the sons of men, on which he evi- 



JESUS OUR MAS TEE A^ T D LORD. 



11 



dently claims to stand, No one who regards the Gos- 
pels as literally or substantially true can call this right 
in question. If Jesus wrought the divine works which 
those books ascribe to him ; if he received the visible 
and audible attestations from heaven which they re- 
cord ; if he actually rose from the dead, as they relate, — 
then no one can doubt that he was ordained and sent 
by God as our Master and Lord. How stands the 
proof? 

It is currently said that the old treatises on the 
Christian evidences, Paley and the like, are superseded. 
This is true in two different senses. On the one hand, 
they are superseded in reasoning with those who main- 
tain that revelation and miracle, and, therefore, histori- 
cal Christianity, are intrinsically impossible; for no 
amount of evidence can prove an impossibility. They 
are superseded, on the other hand, by more ample tes- 
timony, more affluent evidence, more profound histori- 
cal criticism, — the results of a riper Christian scholar- 
ship, — all pointing in the same direction, and leading 
to the same conclusion. Applying to the four Gospels 
the tests which we apply to other ancient writings, I 
am prepared to maintain that we have stronger reason 
for believing that they were written by the men whose 
names they bear, than we have for believing that Cice- 
ro wrote the De Officiis, or Virgil the iEneid. Strong- 
er reasons, I say; for we have for the authorship of the 
Gospels, not only the testimony of individuals, but that 
of representative men, who were the voice of extended 
Christian communities, and to whose testimony there 
is no opposing voice ; and we have this testimony in 
behalf, not of books whose reception was a matter of 
indifference, but of books which were received at the 
hazard and forfeiture of fortune, honor, and life, so that 
there was, from the first, every possible temptation to 
discredit them if they could be discredited. This is 
the conclusion, not of a blind and prejudging faith, 
but of the most diligent and sceptical research ; and it 
is maintained by none with stronger assurance than by 
those most intimately conversant with the monuments 



12 



A TEACT EOE THE TIMES. 



of Christian antiquity, and with the entire range of col- 
lateral history and literature. As for the leading facts 
in the life of Jesus, recorded in these books, the exter- 
nal proof of their authenticity is stronger than we 
have for the universally admitted facts of profane his- 
tory of the same age ; for, in addition to the mass of 
testimony in confirmation of those facts, we have, first, 
the existence and growth of the Christian Church, for 
which it is impossible to account rationally if they were 
false ; secondly, the observance, from primitive times, 
of Christian anniversaries, ordinances, and .commemo- 
rative institutions, which are the collective testimony 
of the earliest Christian communities to the facts com- 
memorated, inasmuch as no such observance can begin 
without an adequate reason ; and, thirdly, the occur- 
rence, within the period when those facts could have 
been tested, and among their professed eye-witnesses, 
of numerous martyrdoms, which, at that period, were 
literally martyrdoms, that is, testimonies, borne at a 
cost which demonstrates the unquestioning belief of 
the witnesses. 

What are the grounds on which this mass of proof is 
set aside? First, it is alleged that miracles and special 
revelation are impossible. Then, because the facts re- 
corded in the Gospels cannot be discredited without 
discrediting the books themselves, it is assumed — not 
proved — that these books cannot have been written 
by disciples and coevals of Jesus, who would have 
known the falsity of their contents ; and violent and 
unnatural hypotheses concerning their composition are 
started, without any pretence of historical testimony, 
or exhibition of internal evidence in their favor. It is 
said that the Gospels were not made, but grew. They 
had no authors, but took their present homogeneous 
shape by successive accretions from many anonymous 
and unauthoritative pens in successive generations. It 
is not pretended that any other books ever grew in 
this way, — that their composition was in accordance 
with any known laws or habits of literary composition, 
or with the normal action of mind in authorship. On 



JESUS OUR MASTER A>~D LORD. 



13 



this theory, the Gospels, especially when we consider 
the homogeneous form in which they have severally 
come down to us, are as truly miracles as any of the 
events which they record ; and their existence can be 
accounted for only by some preternatural action on the 
minds of their legion of writers. Xo sensible man 
would risk his reputation for sanity by maintaining 
such hypotheses with regard to any other than repu- 
tedly sacred books ; and, with regard to these, it is the 
assumed impossibility of their contents that alone can 
justify the resort to expedients so desperate. 

The one sole ground, then, for the denial of the claim 
of Jesus to be called Lord and Master is the alleged 
impossibility of his recorded history, of his specially 
divine mission, of his superhuman endowments and 
works. But this impossibility can be known only by 
an omniscient mind, — by one who stands on the same 
plane with the Creator; for can any finite mind know 
all that it was ever possible for God to do? Yet we 
could point to mere striplings, whose knowledge of the 
things immediately around them is but crass ignorance, 
who deem themselves much more intimately conversant 
with the divine mind than Jesus ever was, and are cer- 
tainly much more profoundly convinced of the narrow 
limits of the divine power and wisdom than of any 
limits to their own intelligence and capacity. 

The alleged facts of the gospel history are not only 
physically possible under the government of omnipo- 
tence, if omnipotence there be; but they differ merely 
in their manward, not in their Godward aspect, from 
the events daily witnessed. Sound philosophy finds 
no efficient causes in nature, and recognizes ia all that 
takes place the omnipotent God as sole force and cause. 
Now if, to aid human prescience, God ordinarily tele- 
graphs the near future by the signs which we call 
causes, He certainly may for higher purposes, affecting 
human well-being, have sometimes omitted these signs, 
in order that the ever-working arm of Omnipotence 
might be laid bare, and that events, not preceded by 
the accustomed smns, might be themselves sioiis of the 



14 



A TRACT FOR THE TIMES. 



presence of a divine messenger or the utterance of a 
divine message. 

There is, in these alleged miracles, no antecedent im- 
possibility ; for to the Infinite Being all alternatives 
must have been possible. General laws, so called, are 
laws, not imposed upon Him, but established by Him. 
They are not a necessity of His nature, but His pre- 
ferred mode of administration, — a preference, which, 
if ordained for the benefit of His intelligent and spirit- 
ual offspring, we can readily imagine and believe to 
have been suspended whenever their greater benefit 
required such suspension. 

About miracles, considered as mere historical facts, I 
care little. Nor do I regard them as antecedently 
necessary to prove the perfect wisdom and excellence 
of Jesus Christ. To my mind, they have a still higher 
worth, as revelations of the underlying and in working 
Providence in ordinary events and in the whole of life. 
Yet, even in this regard, I would not make them an ab- 
solutely essential article of faith; though, for my own 
part, I should cling to them — if sustained, as 'they 
seem to me, by amply adequate proof— as the most 
significant and precious events in the world's history. 
But, in divesting the Gospels of their miraculous char- 
acter, you so mar and lacerate the sacred form of the 
Redeemer, that his very crucifiers were merciful in the 
comparison. You make him either an impostor or a 
madman. You convert his sublimest utterances into 
insane and blasphemous rhodomontade. You take 
away my Lord, and I know not where you have laid 
him. 

Let me, on the other hand, receive the simple narra- 
tive of the Gospels : I find in Jesus strength and beauty, 
wisdom and love, the pattern of perfect humanity, the 
unsullied image of the Supreme Father. I feel that 
he is most worthily my Master, most rightfully my 
Lord. In all things appertaining to the life that now 
is, there is no blessedness to be compared with that of 
obeying and following him : and, but for him, beyond 
the grave all is darkness and the shadow of death ; for, 



JESUS OUR MASTER AXD LORD. 



15 



Lord, to whom else shall we go ? Thou hast the words 
of eternal life. 

I said, at the outset, that the question whether Jesus 
is our Master and Lord is the most important question 
that can be asked and answered on the present occa- 
sion. If you answer it in the negative, you stultify 
our ordination service. We have strong confidence in 
the ability, sincerity, and devotedness of our young 
brother whom you have chosen as your religious 
teacher. But did he abjure his Master and Lord, and 
come to you in his own name, we could not ask you to 
receive him as your guide ; we should rather bid him 
sit as a disciple at the feet of the fathers and mothers 
in your Israel. For how slender is his stock of experi- 
ence compared with yours ! How little knows he, in 
and from his own heart, of the solemn, sad, and dread 
emergencies in which he is to stand at your side as 
counsellor and comforter ! How utterly inadequate is 
he, from aught that can have entered into his own 
young student-consciousness, to shed light upon the 
various life-paths of those who are immersed in the 
cares, conflicts, temptations, and trials of the busy 
world! And, were it not so, — if his intuitions are his 
sole test of truth and duty, why are his intuitions more 
worthy of reliance than your own ? Has he a monop- 
oly of the Spirit, conferred on him by the imposition of 
our hands ? Or have you any right to pay deference 
to his less mature judgment in matters of high moral 
and spiritual concern ? Have you any right to place 
him in a position in which he may bias your own inde- 
pendent convictions, — may use the purchase which 
the pulpit gives him, to draw you from your own seve- 
ral ways of thinking to his self-spun theories of truth 
and right? Oh, no ! We would not invest him with 
so perilous a charge. We could not ask you to be so 
false to your own manhood as to repose in him so per- 
ilous a trust. 

But far different is the case when we ordain him as 
a minister of Jesus Christ. In giving himself to the 
study of the divine word ;.in opening his mind to the 



16 



A TRACT FOE THE TIMES. 



wisdom, his heart to the love of God in Christ; in 
preaching not himself, but the Lord Jesus, — his youth 
shall have the ripeness of age, his slender experience 
the maturity of a finished course. For it will be the 
Ancient of Days that will speak to you by his voice, 
the All-wise that will counsel and guide you in his 
teachings. He may know little of your several life- 
paths ; but he can apply to them the unchanging, ever- 
lasting law of right as uttered in the words and incar- 
nate in the life of Jesus. He may be a 'stranger to the 
trials and sorrows that will gather over your homes and 
hearts ; but he can carry to them the consolations that 
flowed from the Saviour's lips and dwelt in his soul, 
and can breathe into them the peace of the Son of 
God, — that peace which the world can neither give 
nor take away. He may not know in his own person 
the agony of bodily suffering, the weariness of wasting 
disease, the heart-throes of approaching dissolution; 
but he will have communed in tender, devout sympa- 
thy with his suffering, dying Lord ; he will bring to 
your bedsides the lessons of resignation, piety, trust, 
overcoming faith, which he has learned in Gethsemane 
and on Calvary'; and in them he shall be as an angel 
from heaven strengthening you. He may not have 
stood by the lifeless forms or the gravesides of those 
dear to him as his own soul ; but he will have stood 
by the bier of Nain, by the tomb of Bethany, by the 
broken sepulchre of the Lord ; and, full of the power 
of the resurrection, he can change your grief into sol- 
emn joy, make your sighs hos annas, your tears morn- 
ing dewdrops of the day which has no night, as he 
talks to you of the eternal life made manifest in the 
flesh, and rehearses over the spoils and ruins of death 
those sublimest words ever heard on earth, which shall 
echo from grave to grave till the last of the dying shall 
have put on immortality, — "I am the resurrection and 
the life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, 
yet shall he live, and whoso liveth and believeth in me 
shall never die." 
Receive our young brother, then, as a minister of 



JESUS OUR MASTER. AND LORD. 



17 



Christ. Hear, believe, trust him for the sake of his 
Master. Respect, honor, love him for the sake of his 
Lord. God grant that you and your children may 
long rejoice in his light. May souls led by him to 
Christ, and confirmed by him in the faith of their Mas- 
ter and the service of their Lord, be the manifold seal 
of his ministry on earth, and the thickly jewelled 
crown of his joy in heaven ! 



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